Maybe it is…and maybe it isn’t May 28, 2013

I’m sure you’re all (three of you) feeling abandoned from lack of posting….but here I am.

The PET scan was last week and I have been waiting for my appointment with the consultant to get the results – and that happened today.

This week is my stress cluster week… results AND moving house on Thursday.

I saw my GP last week and we noted my black dog is back and they suggested anti-depressants again but I’m hoping once I get this week over and done with – that the depression will lift again and all the positive stuff around having my own place will give me a boost.

Sooooo… anyway… appointment today and when I referred, on Facebook, to this being a Schrödinger’s cat of a week I had no idea how close I was to the truth.

The results are that there is still activity around my colon… the PET scan can show cell activity- what it can’t do is distinguish between cancerous cell activity and the sort of activity caused by having an inflammed and thickened colon. As PET scanners are relatively new technology there also aren’t decades of diagnostic interpretation behind it  to be able to make that judgement call… so it won’t get made.

What they are suggesting I do, is go in for another laproscopy (which is heartening) as the ‘mass’ is now small enough to remove through an equally small hole and I get to lose a small section of colon as opposed to the ‘almost a third’ which was on the cards back in the dim and distant days of having a camera up my bum last year in the ‘before we knew it was cancer’ time.

So…it could be cancer…it might not and we won’t know until I’m opened up. (and the removed portion prodded and tested).

My consultant said in the olden days (pre PET scans) or if I was an older person they’d be happy leaving me with the uncertainty… but as a younger person with responsibilities (and who reacts badly to not knowing stuff) surgery looks the best option.

And I think I agree with her.

Right… now on with the packing boxes.

 

grindeth the cogs of change March 18, 2013

Ach well… the best laid plans and all that.

Turns out a birthday gathering might be a stress too much on the household… with all best intentions in the world there are times when our house teeters zit like on the edge of pustular explosion…. we had a bit of seepage at the weekend with Jane having a major wobbly down in Morrisons.

We all have our wobblies.

So cancel the meat paste sandwiches and birthday cake and this morning I rang the hospital and re-re-jigged my next doctor appointment and chemo back to where they should have been. Which puts my (hopefully) last chemo (number 8) into April… which psychologically is a month better than it would have been with the delay for my birthday (ok we all know it was only a weeks delay…but ssssssssssssh)!

We’ve also managed, Jane and I to sit down (or rather lean around in the kitchen) and start to have proper conversations about ‘the future’ and ‘what happens next’…. blessed relief all round I’d say. For her much of the relief was (like pre-transition) that I wasn’t going to shout at her (mostly the stress of not knowing whats happening in my life at all makes me shouty) and for me that she isn’t intending on just selling up and kicking me out to fend for myself and the boy in the wilds of Lincolnshire whilst she gallivants off on a networking fest in the bright lights big city.

The grand plan..and there are plans within plans and spin off plans and hypothetical situations.. is that we stay local mostly for the boys’ continuity, we sell the big house and ‘somehow’ end up in two smaller houses.

How this happens isn’t clear yet… but there are lots of options. (though if someone could lend me £80,000 tomorrow I could crack on with my favourite option soon as).

The boy is on side that we’ll have two smaller houses… he hopes ours will have the dog in it and the X-Box and he wants a smaller garden that we can manage (bluebells, snowdrops and tomatoes in tubs…maybe a pond) and the other will have a cat (and Jane) in it. We had a look online and he rather likes the look of modern two bed houses…which is good…as that’s what we’ll probably end up in.

Whatever happens…and whatever the next few months bring at least we’ve broken the impasse and (I hope) we all feel a lot more relaxed  that change is afoot and it’ll be a positive change for all of us.